


from the valley to the stars

by viscountfrancisbacon



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Fluff and very light angst, Gen, Humor, Pyre AU, Roadtrips, just the barest smattering of angst because i cant write Real Suffering, roadtrip except in this au the road to hell with paved with ritual hell basketball
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 06:06:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscountfrancisbacon/pseuds/viscountfrancisbacon
Summary: the Dwendalian Empire sends its convicts and its enemies to the boundless puragatory of the Downside, never to return. but the Eight Scribes gave their freedom so that we might yet have ours.slowly but surely, one by one, seven unlikely exiles become the Nightwings.





	from the valley to the stars

**Author's Note:**

> more like the NEINwings amiright??
> 
> i had,,,, so many fics I was supposed to be working on,,,,,, but i'm listening to critical role for the first time and i LOVE pyre and i realized these two things go perfectly together. turns out my Fucking Jam is just supernatural found families traveling the land in their vehicle of choice and having adventures together. only in this one, instead of dungeons or dragons, the gang tackles Ritual Hell Basketball. thus, the only critrole fic i'm going to write (forgive me js) while the characters voices are still fresh in my mind, and somehow the first pyre fic i've posted despite having something like 5 unfinished ones on my hard drive.
> 
> title comes from the song by el perro del mar

 

In the end, they’re thrown into the cage together. Partially because nobody involved gave a damn – why bother, for a ratty beggar and a drunken goblin? Mostly, though, it’s because neither lets them – Caleb is skin and bones, so skinny even Nott can wrap her legs around his waist and lock her ankles. She wraps her clawed fists in his ragged leather coat and screeches like a banshee at anyone who comes close. She presses her filthy, weeping face to his chest and feels his heartbeat thunder.

Caleb, for his part, clutches her with all his meager strength, curls around her and then shuts down entirely, no longer responding to anything outside his own head – a greater weight around her neck than the cage and the chains and the stares.

“Let the sentence for such crimes as these be death!” calls out one of the Justices.

“But have we no _mercy?_ ” cries another, “to spare even the lowest of our kin?”

Nott doesn’t know enough about the law to know it’s all ritual phrases, a cursory trial. She can tell already there will be no mercy here, no true mercy, not for either of them – what else matters, compared to that?

The chosen sentence, in the end, is exile. It’s always exile. Caleb mutters in broken Zemnian as the cage bobs down the river, Nott working furiously at the locks with the picks she stuffed down her trousers. She gets the cage open just as it tips over the peak of the waterfall.

 

Caleb sinks down to his knees in the sand, salt encrusted clothes crunching, and he thinks that this is a fine place to die. Well, not fine, but it’s a place, and he’s dying, so it’s a thing that’s happening is what he’s getting at.

He can feel Nott leaning against him – his little friend, his shadow since the day they broke out of jail together. A pity they couldn’t manage two for two.

Caleb came to after the fall with his chains hanging loose and the cage door torn off, the whole damned thing sinking in the water. He can swim, mostly, but Nott can’t and when he dragged them both to shore she wasn’t breathing. He can’t even remember how he revived her, but she’s alive and she’s here and she hasn’t left his side. Sometimes she talks, chattering about nothing or begging her hallucinations for a drink, but now – now it’s quiet. It’s very quiet.

It’s a fine place to die, so he gets comfortable. Well, not comfortable, but he’s lying down and he’s dying and after a hazy amount of time Nott worms her way in to curl up against his chest, and this certainly is a thing that’s happening.

There’s an odd thundering in the distance, like wagon wheels but faster.

 

“Are you sure we should bother?” Yasha asks him, not unkindly, but with her usual brand of stoic, soft-spoken pragmatism. “They might just die.”

She’s a paragon of both good sense and biceps, Yasha is, so Molly grins a fond grin and explains, “I’m aware, that’s why I’m not using any of the water.”

He turns back to the larger of the lumps of sand they’ve tentatively classed as living exiles and continues wiping down their arms with a clean, dry rag. The idle motion of his tail is slow and hypnotic, his smile dropping off for a comforting, neutral expression as he starts peeling off a truly nasty pair of fingerless gloves.

“Hurts, doesn’t it,” he says at their soft moan, the glove peeling off a layer of skin with it. He flashes just a hint of fang, “But hey, that’s life for ya.”

“Why are you doing this,” they whisper, voice desert-rough and distinctly accented. “What do you – what do you want.”

Molly hums. “From you? Just a question or two, really – no need to be shy, we’re all well and damned already down here.”

There’s a cloak to the side they stripped off the bigger one. Molly leans over and scoops it up, lays it out over his lap with a flourish, a little carnie flash he’s not yet discarded – the little green exile, still trying to play dead and pickpocket him at the same time, yelps and skitters back. The tall human one just stares, a flicker of recognition at the emblem – a five-pointed star with a line down the middle, its two lower points elongated to make a star with three downward facing arrows. They look scared. They look, Molly intuits as someone who’s developed a very good sense for it, dangerous. It’s only to be expected, though, from someone caught wearing this particular symbol.

There is only one brand that criminals are marked with, in the Empire. Only one crime they think everyone, even exiles sent Downside, ought to be warned of.

“So. Can you read, friend?” Molly asks.

 

They’re odd, these two exiles she and Molly picked up.

The human man – Caleb – looks like he’s fully expecting a trap right up until he spots the book. There are more that they’ve found, nearly a dozen, all identical (as far as they can tell) blocks of pure heresy and impenetrable mystery that they’ve been assured holds the key to freedom. Molly left one open on a pedestal for whatever Mollymauk-ish reason, and Caleb – there’s no other word – _gravitates_ to it, as if bewitched.

Maybe he has been. Obviously it’s magical, being a book.

The goblin girl Nott makes a faintly surprised noise. She goes over to him, giving Yasha a wide berth to tug eagerly on her companion’s sleeve. “Caleb, look!”

Caleb ignores her. He reaches out, hand faintly trembling, and though Yasha and Molly both subtly put hands closer to weapons all he does is turn a page. The two ex-carnies wait with baited breath, unsure what sort of spell he might be weaving.

Nott glances over, back at Caleb, then back at them – puffing up a little with patently put-on bravado. “See,” she says in her grating, high-pitched voice, “I told you he’s the best at this! He’s very smart, and a very powerful Reader, and extremely intelligent, and also did I mention how handsome he is?”

“Oh, man,” Molly says at last, warm honey grin spreading slowly across his face as he watches Caleb read. “Oh, that’s just lovely, ain’t it?” He turns to Yasha, and it’s only when he meets her eyes does the smile creep, genuine, into his. “We’re gonna go free, Yasha,” he says to her, breathless. His pupilless red gaze gleams in the lamplight. “We’re gonna –”

And then the darkness takes them.

 

Yasha opens her eyes as heavenly fire screams down, impact heavy in her gut, the flames burning hot at her back.

She knows instinctively she’s in some sort of void, but no black eternity this – it’s a riot of color to put the circus to shame. A voice – a _Voice –_ booms far above them, words she cannot quite make out. They’re standing on a field – no – a page _–_ they’re standing on the oddly flat surface of an enormous open book. Far across, embedded in the ground on the other side, is a disc taken up by a really rather plain symbol of a star, the whole thing burning with green fire.

She knows without knowing there’s a disc – _it’s a sigil it’s our pyre_ – just behind them, a red and blue symbol like the moon that burns with blue fire. The pyre burns with blue fire. She burns with blue fire.

Just behind _them_. She stands in front of their pyre with Molly and Nott, all three of them clad in the ceremonial robes and masks – _raiments_ – she and Molly had found in the blackwagon along with the books. They also have the books, open in their hands, words she cannot quite make out. Caleb is – _right here_ – Caleb is here – Caleb is somewhere that is both here and there, everywhere at once, but he’s with them.

_I’m with you_.

Molly radiates awed excitement, feeling the allure of the unknown that is so specifically him. Nott is terrified and feeling very small, though she likes all the colors, bright and glassy like her trinkets, and she’s glad Caleb is here. Caleb will know what to do.

_I know what to do. Let me show you the way._

An orb falls from the heavens.

 

The evening before their first Rite, Yasha dreams of it. The stars align. It’s not the void, this time, merely the chosen celestial landmark properly prepared and limned with sacred power. Fire falls from the sky to light the pyres. They are there, and the opposing triumvirate stands across the field, and when the celestial orb lands she is Yasha, she is Yasha-Molly-Nott, she is Yasha-Molly-Nott-and-Caleb.

She’s dreamed of this before, hasn’t she?

In the Rite-that-will-be, she surges forward three-as-one. In the dream, just for a moment, Yasha looks up and sees the stormclouds in the sky have parted to reveal the stars.

 

They’re at a bar. Turns out even the Downside – _especially_ the Downside – has bars, even if they don’t have much for villages or even buildings. The “village” is a nomadic hodgepodge of life, the bar is a large tent, and the ale is ale no matter how many extravagant lies Molly tells about Hollowroot hops.

They’re at a bar and they’re debating what sort of formation to use in the next Rite – or rather, Caleb and Nott are debating and dragging the other two into it, because he is of the opinion that they need Nott’s nimble speed upfront and center and she emphatically thinks this idea is horseshit no matter how gently she tries to phrase it.

Eventually, they reach the compromise of running a practice Rite – and _only_ a practice Rite – with Nott in front, so they tromp on out to the outskirts where the blackwagon is parked. They have a ball they use for practice – it’s a poor replacement for a celestial orb and nothing (but certainly not a ragged field) beats the atmosphere of pyreground, but the only alternative is the Beyonder Crystal so the ball it is.

What follows is a fairly standard practice session for them – which is to say the others do a lot of running around and tossing the ball back and forth and generally making a great mess of their raiments. Caleb’s participation in practice basically amounts to calling out passages from the Book and trying not to feel like more of a useless dumbass than he usually does.

“Oh wow. Would ya look at that,” someone drawls off to the side, giving a shitty little chuckle. Caleb turns, and there is a woman leaning against an empty hitching post. Human, brown skinned, wiry with muscle. There’s a flagon balanced on top of the post, and the woman’s smile is lilting and comfortably tipsy. “You guys are – you’re kinda good at this.”

Nott tries to hide the ball behind her back, which is slightly comical because it’s a little wider than she is. Yasha stands there, silent and stoic on the outside but a little embarrassed on the inside. Molly laughs and sketches an elaborate bow.

Caleb just stands there, gobsmacked, because as a Reader he can tell that was a _genuine compliment_.

“You,” he says, blankly, “you are an _asshole_.”

The woman huffs and scratches the stubbly side of her undercut, not really offended but a tiny bit hurt inside. “Uh, yeah? Yeah, that’s me.” She takes the flagon and gestures at them, pierced brow quirked. “So, uh… you often play sports with just one team?”

“Sports?” Nott says, shrill. He’s not entirely sure what she’s panicking about – it’s not like most Downsiders would even believe the truth. “This isn’t sports! I’ve never done a sports in my life! This is…” _Oh no_ , Caleb thinks, “...this is an orgy! Very kinky! You’re not invited!”

“The sort of orgy where you’re all fully clothed, covered in mud, and tossing a ball around?”

“Well, you know what they say,” Molly says with his most shiteating grin. “When it comes to sexual pleasure, there’s no wrongs, just…” Caleb pinches the bridge of his nose. “...Rites.”

Yasha laughs. Nott throws the ball at him.

“Ignore them,” Caleb says tiredly. He ambles over, slow, looking her over. The woman eyes him back, curious but reserved. “You want to, ah, play with us, yes? You want to run around and get muddy and toss the ball into the goal?”

She’s surprised he sussed her out so quickly. “Uhhh. Yeah. I dunno if this is a pick-up game, but when I was… well, back where I was, before, they played a lot of games like this. Said it was good for the soul or some fucking bullshit.”

_We the Eight decree the Rites a test of one's true worth in body, mind, and spirit._

“...Yes,” Caleb says, “Bullshit. Regardless… do you wish to join us?”

The woman’s mouth says only “Yeah, sure, I guess,” but her heart is much more telling than that.

 

Her name is Beau, short for Beauregard. He comes to know many things about her, but two facts above all;

One – she is an asshole.

Two…

The first time Beau gets near the opponent’s pyre, orb in hand, a cackling cur blocks the path. Their aura comes a hairsbreadth to snuffing her out, and in their heads Caleb is urging her _move, move now, pass the orb and retreat!_

Beau, new to being three-as-one but taught very well the raw capability of her body, moves so quickly her intentions are impossible to translate into words. She jukes, weaving out of the way with masterful grace. Beau winds back, for a split second impossibly patient as the cur turns on a dime, and then with an almighty leap she spikes the orb directly into the Dissidents’ pyre.

Two – she is _very good_ at sports.

 

“Jester! Jester, for fuck’s sake,” Beau hisses.

“Just a minute~” Jester singsongs.

An attempt was made to tie up her pretty flowing sleeves, but satin ribbons don’t make for great knots, and now the delicate floral edges trail in the muck. As Beau watches, Jester squats and gets her hands under the uneven base of a large rock, using her unusual strength to flip the boulder end over end. It lands with a wet noise and a splatter of filth, Jester wiping some gunk off her cheek and rubbing it off on her leather chestpiece.

Beau catches a flying clod of dirt – _good gods above_ it had better just be dirt – midair and drops it. She wipes her hand off on Jester’s back. The young tiefling shrieks in outrage.

“Ew! Beau, don’t.”

“What, you’re just gonna use Mending to clean it off,” Beau says.

“Clean my _clothes_! Don’t get your smelly grave goo on the Traveler.”

Beau gives the Beyonder Crystal a long look. It’s wrapped in a ragged blanket and over it Jester’s cute little cape, the richly dyed forest green a stark contrast to the Crystal’s glowing neon. Jester has the whole thing strapped to her back, and staunchly refused to leave the blackwagon that morning without it.

“Dude, no judgment, but it’s kinda weird that you don’t mind desecrating mass graves but getting dirt on your orb god is crossing the line.”

“I’m not _desecrating_ them,” Jester says, “but anyway these people are all very dead and the Traveler isn’t. _And,_ you shouldn’t flick gravedirt on him because it’s not like he’s got hands to clean it off. I mean he has, like, spiritual hands and I’m sure those work really good, but you know he can’t touch usually things on the material plane.”

“He’s kinda dead, though, isn’t he? I mean, dude’s haunting an orb. Dunno if he counts as _living_ , is all I’m saying.”

Jester glances sidelong with conversational casualness, the tilt of her face attentive as she listens to words Beau can’t hear from an entity she can’t see. Jester gives a sharp little _ha!_. She swings back around to face Beau with a teasing smile, the silver charm below her tailtip jingling merrily.

Beau cuts her off with a one finger salute, aimed at the empty space where she guesses the Traveler has manifested himself, his essence in the ethereal plane like sheer silk over the canvas of the physical world. He could make himself visible to her if he wanted to, she knows, but if she’s not touching the Crystal he doesn’t have to. He never shows himself voluntarily to anyone but Jester.

“Yeah, fuck you too buddy,” she drawls, though not entirely seriously.

The Beyonder Crystal is _weird_ , and she can see why everyone preferred not to use it before Jester joined their merry little band of exiles, but it’s not really any of her business. Jester is a grown ass woman, and while Beau doesn’t actually _trust_ the Traveler not to pull some freaky spirit shit (though he claims, as someone bound to serve the Rites and those who conduct them, to be incapable of harming them), she trusts Jester.

(And also Caleb, because there are fucking _stories_ about people like him in the Cobalt Soul. Stories about people who might have _been_ Cobalt Soul)

(Beau suspects, sometimes, that if she’d stayed a little longer Dairon might have taught her her letters. She looks at Nott, painstakingly transcribing the alphabet as Caleb shows her how, and she thinks _oh, duh, after A comes–_ )

( _Enlightenment_ , the monks always said. _We must achieve enlightenment_ )

She trusts Jester, almost as blunt as Beau is and endlessly cheerful, her friend in a way Beau’s never had. Mostly because she’s… never really had friends period. So, end of the day, if Jester thinks this thing bound in crystal is the god she’s been seeking, Beau ain’t about to burst her bubble. This is the Downside, fucking everything is weird, so what?

Also, Jester can cast cleric spells. Not a whole lot of other explanations for that.

“No, seriously though,” Beau says, breaking the companionable silence as Jester pokes at the mud underneath the rock. “This place is a mass grave. You’re a cleric, aren’t you supposed to like… y’know, cleanse it or something?”

Jester laughs and waves her handaxe, illustrating her point with steel and the flick of her tail.

“I’m a cleric of the _Traveler_.” She says, tossing her pretty blue hair. “ _He_ says the only thing I’m _supposed_ to be is a living force of pure mayhem.” Her proud, spoiled-sweet smile flips abruptly to a pouty frown as she pokes again at the dirt, underneath which Beau hopes isn’t the tortured remains of some poor forgotten soul. “Also he told me there was something valuable out here, but I’m not finding anything! This is terrible, Beau.”

“Yeah, well, we’re in a shitty swamp-pit, Jes. Everything is terrible in Flagging Hands.”

Jester sighs. “Yeah, I guess.” She kicks at the ground. “Ugh, fucking Coldmoat! Let’s just go.”

A rotting, dessicated arm springs from the dirt and grabs Jester’s trailing sleeve, yanking with uncanny strength when she tries to get away. Something has Beau’s ankles in a tight, bony grip.

“What the–”

“AH! ZOMBIES!” Jester screams. Her flailing summons a colorful riot of spelllight, swirling in midair.

A giant lollypop slams into the ground. Beau twists, springs into the air, and unleashes a thundering axe kick onto the rotting head emerging from the soil.

 

They fish Fjord out of the Sea of Solis. Literally fish him out.

One moment, Beau’s trying her hand with a fishing pole haggled from the machinist’s outpost in Flagging Hands, stretched out on the rail with one foot hooked between the slats to keep her from falling (because she doesn’t want to drown but she _does_ want to look cool).

Then her hook catches on something, and immediately her line snaps taut with an alarming _twang_ , and as the pole bends nearly to breaking Beau thinks _aw fuck no, that’s ten gold!_

So she hauls back on the pole as hard as she can, and the line doesn’t snap, but something below cries out in pain. Something hoarse and garbled, waterlogged.

And also Beau goes flying off the rail and into the ocean.

Granted, she avoids slamming into the hull with a badass little twist n’ flip, but then she lands and she’s sucked under and for a brief moment it’s like being banished in a Rite – cold and dark and endless.

Beau opens her eyes and sees a body floating next to her down in the depths, skin bruise-dark and tattered white shirt stained pink. Piercing, golden eyes stare her down.

She doesn’t scream, but she definitely taps into her ki. She takes off like a shot towards the vague notion of up.

When she surfaces, Beau looks up to see a bedraggled purple head leaning over the rail, lavender cheeks tinged an ugly grey. One of the disadvantages of not remembering most of your life, it turns out – you forget little things like a tendency towards violent seasickness.

“Puke on me and I will _kill_ you, Mollymauk!” Beau yells.

“Very kind of you to pretend there’s anything left in the tank,” Molly shouts back. He pauses, and his horn ornaments flash in the sun – he’s tilting his head. “Wait – what’s that?”

Beau looks over. The corpse bobs on the water in a dead man’s float.

“Man, _fuck_ the ocean.”

 

The body they haul out of the water alongside Beau is a teal skinned humanoid wearing worn, mismatched leathers. The same face she saw but different clothes, and Jester’s just about to pop off a Turn Undead just in case when the corpse convulses and starts gasping with a drowned man’s desperation. Finding air instead of water, they somehow manage to roll onto their side and start coughing.

Nott shrieks, and almost idly Beau snaps out a hand and catches a crossbow bolt before it can skewer their new guest.

Caleb completes an incantation – Dispel Magic, she thinks. It has no visible effect.

“Well, shit,” Caleb says, scratching scruffy stubble with a look of actual surprise. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

Molly asks, “Where did this one come from, Beau? I thought you were fishing for, well, _fish_.”

When she looks, she spots her fishing hook buried in a leather pauldron.

“Huh.” Beau admits – “Appeared outta fucking nowhere, as far as I can tell.”

The stranger from the sea coughs, thumps themselves weakly on the chest. Spits up one last dribble of brine and snot.

“Who the fuck are you?” They wheeze.

“Who the fuck are _you_ ,” Jester shoots back.

“I’m – augggh. Fuck. I’m –” They – he, maybe – grabs the railing and staggers to his feet, hunched over. He gives them a look through soaked, short-cropped black bangs. “M’name’s… Fjord. Nice to… meet y’all.”

Yasha is hovering at the back of the group, watching him with her quiet, kohl-dark gaze. “Where did you come from?”

Fjord wipes his mouth, massages his throat. “I was – I had a ship. It… exploded. I went overboard and–”

He stops midsentence. Gags a little, and at first Beau thinks he’s gonna hurl. Instead he opens his mouth and seawater pours from his lips, off his tongue. Fjord gags again, his brows furrowed, and as he bends over he crams his fingers into his mouth. They watch as he pulls the tip of a pommel out, a hilt, a short crossguard that bulges his cheeks, an entire blade. The sword itself drips, not with condensation, but as though it’s always fresh from the depths.

“Huh,” Molly says from behind Beau. She hears him clap his hands together. “I like this guy! Can we keep him?”

 

They do keep him. Turns out, operating a boat is _much_ easier with a sailor on board, even when said boat is otherwise a blackwagon. Fjord eyed the drive imps suspiciously, but he knew how to jigger a rudder or whatever the fuck makes them go in the right direction, and that’s enough.

Eventually, though, they reach their destination. Preparing for the Rite is chaos – the celestial landmark is a _shipwreck_ , of all places, though admittedly there’s not a whole lot of places to slay a sea-titan but the sea. Somehow Fjord ends up in the thick of things, navigating the treacherous deck of the Hulk of Ores to light the candles and set the boundary-runes and polish the masks. He finds the lost hood that goes with Nott’s goblin-sized raiments, helps Molly lace up his long boots, and soon the hour is upon them. The chosen conductors array themselves around the unlit sigil. Caleb sits at the exact center of the sidelines holding the Book, as per tradition, with the rest of them in mask and raiment flanking him.

Eventually, someone involved does the math.

“Wait… Fjord, are you here?”

One of the figures goes particularly still. “Uh… not if I ain’t supposed to be?” His mask tilts. “Everyone else was putting the robes on, so I sorta just assumed… my apologies if I’ve been presumptuous.”

There’s a long pause.

“...Huh. Welcome to the Nightwings, I guess. The more the merrier?”

Caleb’s already half-distracted by the Book. “Pay close attention, ja? You’ve got a lot to learn.”

 

The Wakingwood is a forest as wild as, well, the Feywild, labyrinthian in scale and design – a goddamn nightmare to travel through. When they have the time and funds to return to Flagging Hands and repair the blackwagon’s wings they will, but in the meantime they must continue even if it means slogging through brambles for a week. Mount Alodiel is visible in the distance, white-topped peaks rising above even the choking canopy, and every night the stars drift towards it. Freedom is nigh at hand.

It makes the air whenever they stop fraught with tension – everyone is cautious about moving on, but nobody wants to stick around for long. Not in this forest.

But of course, eventually they start getting used to the weird sounds and the suspicious marks on the trees and the way the vines keep trying to tangle their wheels. Then it’s back to business as normal, which for them is either Rites or conspicuous bullshittery.

“Nott, let’s go pick flowers!” Jester proposes one day.

Nott looks up from restringing her crossbow – her big yellow eyes always give her a part surprised, part fearful, part feral look, but this time the furrow of her brow makes her look distinctly skeptical.

“Uh – there are flowers here? That _won’t_ try and eat you?”

Jester kicks her legs thoughtfully – she’s sitting on a log they dragged over for a makeshift bench, so huge and old her feet dangle. Her tail curls in the air, a living question mark to contrast her rising determination as she insists, “But this is a forest, surely there are flowers _somewhere_. We just have to look really hard,” seeing Nott not immediately argue she continues, gaining steam, “and it’ll be just like the storybooks! The classic ones, you know, with pretty young maidens frolicking in the fields. I always wanted to try that, they make it sound like such fun.”

Nott scratches her face and mutters self-deprecatingly, “Well, then, you’ll have ask a pretty young maiden to accompany you, haha.”

“I have!” Jester cries, throwing her hands and her tail up. She points dramatically at Nott. “It’s you, silly!”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is! You are so pretty, Nott, and Yasha is gone doing Yasha things, and Beau looks very good but she is more _handsome_ than _pretty_ , and anyway you are the youngest of us right? I forget how goblin years work.”

Nott gives her a considering look and bites her lip, which she does very gently given the size and heft of her considerable teeth. “Well… if we can find some flowers for Yasha’s book…”

Jester leaps off the log. “Let’s go!”

Jester keeps up a rambling account of all the stories she was told as a child (between the books, her mother, and the Traveler it seems there were quite a lot), which then segways into some of the pranks she played as a child, which turns into the types of pranks she’d like to play on their fellow triumvirates. They go carefully and slowly, but it’s hard to find anything other than mosses and mushrooms and the types of flowers that _do_ eat people, and soon they are very deep into the Wakingwood indeed.

Eventually, they reach a strange metal… _thing_ blocking the way. After some investigation, they determine it’s a fence, old and bowed under the sheer weight of the living things overtaking it. Nott nearly insists they go back then and there, but eventually they continue… and find another fence, slightly less overgrown. And further in another, this one almost intact. There’s a strange, perfumed scent in the air. When Jester recognizes it as a floral scent, she becomes unstoppable.

“Hello! Hellloooooo,” Jester calls out.

“Why are you shouting,” Nott hisses. “Do you _want_ to get caught by some sort of… of… fey monster?”

“No, but there has to be _someone_ here, if there’s a fence. Fences are for keeping things out.”

“Oh, yes, but that one doesn’t work so well anymore,” says the tall, furred humanoid looming above them. They smile a little, politely, placid cow-like eyes crinkling. “Hello to you too.”

He introduces himself as Caduceus Clay, caretaker of the Blooming Grove. And then he invites them in for tea.

“Ooooooh,” Jester exclaims when she sees the flowers, seemingly endless in color and variety.

“Ahhhhh,” Nott whisper-screams when she notices the rows upon rows of gravestones, some of them old and worn and some of them decidedly newer than that.

Caduceus claps his hands together once and Nott startles violently.

“Oh, that’s just lovely,” he says out of nowhere, with a soft laugh-like whuffle.

“What is lovely?” Jester asks. Her tail is lashing about excitedly, slapping everything in her wake so she’s trailed by a quiet surrurus of plants.

The firbolg turns to look at them. “I have,” he tells them solemnly, “three teacups. Just enough for all of us.”

“Lucky us…”

Caduceus invites them into his house – which is not a house, they both realize, but a temple. A little rundown, but grand, and beautiful, and like nothing either of them have ever quite seen in the Downside or above. He serves them tea, and listens to their chatter about their journey and the Wakingwood and the Rites, and when they make their excuses and get up to leave he stands as well.

“Uh – very nice of you, Mr. Clay, to escort us to the door,” Nott says. “Very, um, chivalrous.”

“Not really,” Caduceus says, as he ambles over to grab a loaded pack from beside a pew. His staff, mossy wood set with a hunk of pale amethyst, is already in hand. “I will be accompanying you, I think.”

“You think?” Jester asks.

Caduceus pauses for a moment, like he’s actually considering it.

“Yes,” he concludes, “I do. The Wildmother would not have me dream of the sacred mountain if not for a purpose, and that is where you are headed after this, yes? Mount Alodiel?”

“Oh. Do you want to leave the Downside, then? Because that is what we are doing, earning our freedom.”

He waves dismissively. “No, no. But there is something wrong with the Blooming Grove, and with the Wakingwood. Something… malicious. If the Wildmother bids me turn to the heavens instead of her earthly domain, to find the cure to what ails the forest… I follow her. And so, I follow you.”

“Great, great great great,” Jester says. She taps her fingers together. Points them at Caduceus. “There’s just, uh, one problem there my man.”

“Hm?”

“We were like. Suuuper lost when you found us.”

“Oh. That does sound like a problem.”

 

There’s some opposition to adding Caduceus to the bunch – mostly on the grounds of not trusting strange men you meet in the forest, and also by this point they are _significantly_ larger in number than any other triumvirate they’ve met thus far – but it all stutters to an abrupt halt when they discover he can read.

“You’re literate?” Caleb blurts out. He stops and backpeddles a little. “Not that there’s, ah, anything wrong with that. Of course.”

Caduceus blinks at him, head slightly tilted. “Of course.”

“But you _can_ read, right? You’re not just trying to score some quick cred with the new crew?” Beau drawls. Her usual tough girl act is a little harder to follow up, though, given that the new guy is almost two feet taller than she is.

“Yes, I can read.” He pauses. His eyes crinkle a little at the edges, a brighter pink than his hair. “Ah – is that surprising somehow? I’ve been under the impression there were quite a lot more people, up above.”

Caleb blows out a breath, rubbing his neck. “Yes, well, the Empire uses all those extra bodies to very _strictly_ enforce laws like the ban… on…”  A beat. “Ah. Forgive me for prying, but – how _long_ have you been an exile?”

“Oh, I’m not.” Caduceus gestures vaguely at the trees around them. “My family is native to the Wakingwood, you see. All us kids learned to read – our parents insisted.”

“Oh,” Caleb says. “ _Oh._ And… where exactly in the forest did you say you lived, again?”

“Caleb, for fuck’s sake.”

 

When they win the Liberation Rite, Beau hurling herself into the Temper’s pyre with one last desperate lunge, Molly’s raiments turn a brilliant, blinding white trimmed in gold. He looks beautiful in them, sanctified – but no less the man they’ve come to love, there where he kneels before the Shimmer-Pool. Before he leaps into it, he turns back to face them and he smiles.

It is the last time they will ever see him again.

**Author's Note:**

> i only realized at the end that jester ended up the only one who didn't get an introductory scene. please imagine that she joins in the exact manner the stowaway/moon-touched girl does, namely by using her freakish strength to cling to the bottom of the blackwagon until they accept her into their group. they have the traveler, guys, she can't just LEAVE. i see you and your orb wife and raise you one Orb God.
> 
> (not to imply that the traveler is better than sandra, because it's fucking sandra)
> 
> also, i beg you not to @ me about any of the wonky worldbuilding. i very clumsily smashed these characters into this world so yes, i imply there's both pyre AND d&d races and YES there's d&d magic and NO, i don't know where the fuck the lone minstrel is.
> 
> (this is a lie, in my heart tariq is played in this au by matt mercer, he's just always off-screen. celeste is thus... also matt mercer, i guess. in fact, you can probably assume that in true critrole fashion, everyone who isn't a mighty neinwing is matt mercer doing a character voice)


End file.
